Understanding

Understanding makes for intimacy
And distance, jumbled together as well
As separate, it stays near and goes far,
Tries to reconcile the bleak and the dear

Understanding is no fixed perception,
Process more than result, an encounter
For which it is not easy to account,
Never ultimate but always at risk

Yet thrilling as any prospect of woods
And hills whose greenery is stirred by breeze,
From within which comes out the lovely song
Of flying descendants of dinosaurs

A feather in the cap bespeaks lost time
That is present in understanding’s rhyme